It started in the usual way that you get on your travels if you like talking to strangers, and this particular chat happened last month in the elegant reception hall of the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
I’d just spent a few pleasant weeks with firends in my usual place, right on the Indian Ocean in the south of the island – at $23 per night, including breakfast – so I was happy to revel in the very different ambient of the Galle Face Hotel (partly designed by a Scottish architect, and frequented by world luminaries for over 150 years ).
I was enjoying the spaciousness of the hotel foyer and its air conditioning, and watching people arriving and leaving when a lady with lustrous, well-cut silver hair, intense energy and beautiful colours, silk and cotton, sat down. An elderly but nimble man was with her, he smiled politely.
The lady moved close to me, conspiratorial like a schoolgirl, as if she’d known me for years:
“Don’t tell anyone but my husband is furious. Don’t draw attention to us. He’s a famous astronomer and they’ve sent a film crew to the hotel to ruin our holiday ! “
She was older than me but felt like a teenager. Healthy, vigorous, quick, lithe amusing and easy to amuse. We chatted a bit about Britain ( where she’d been living for decades although she was Sri Lankan ), she mentioned a trip she’d had in the Highlands and demonstrated an unexpected ability to mimick Scottish accents.
” We’re waiting for the driver: been invited for afternoon tea with the former Prime Minister, the woman. We’re nipping off now quickly so the camera crew don’t catch on. “
The ‘famous atronomer’, who I later discovered online is also an eminent mathematician and pioneer in astrobiology, was Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe MBE, and here are a few lines from a recent interview with him on YouTube:
“We are connected to an infinite source of intelligence and bacteria have intelligence. ….We could be subjects of manipulation through bacteria ingress from space, and ‘the aliens’ we are looking for could maybe all be bacteria. I have an open mind about this….. God to me is the total content of the intelligence in the universe. That would be my god with all its bacteria and viruses and quantum interactions.”
And his lively and charismatic wife Priya was not only waggish, brilliant and friendly, but is the author of various Indian cookbooks, published internationally.
Out There & In Here 